Is Stupid Making Us Google? Is Screening Making Us Stupid? Maybe. - James Bowman

Is Stupid Making Us Google?

by James Bowman


Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I渇 spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That旧 rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I観 always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.?Sound familiar? Describing, in The Atlantic Monthly, his own struggles to keep his attention span from contracting like the wild ass旧 skin in Balzac旧 novel, Nicholas Carr cites a British study of research habits among visitors to two serious scholarly websites which suggests a more general problem: that 庁sers are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of 襷eading?are emerging as users 褜ower browse?horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.?BR>